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Weiye Loh

Privacy in Singapore - 9 views

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN002553.pdf There is no general data protection or privacy law in Singapore. The government has been aggressive in using surveill...

Singapore Privacy Electronic Road Pricing Surveillance

started by Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

Censoring Sex Education - 3 views

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1002815/1/.html International guidelines on sex education reignite debate By Ong Dailin, TODAY | Posted: 04 September 2009 071...

Sex Education

started by Weiye Loh on 04 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Valerie Oon

players' nightmare: don't date him bulletin - 3 views

http://dontdatehimgirl.com allows women to post warnings about 'bad dates' to prevent potential heartbreak for other women. These posts can contain very personal information about the 'jerk' in que...

privacy surveillance

started by Valerie Oon on 09 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Online "Toon porn" - 20 views

I must correct that never in my arguments did I mentioned that the interpreter is the problem. I was merely answering YZ's question if cartoon characters can be deemed as representative of human be...

online cartoon anime pornography ethics

started by Ang Yao Zong on 01 Sep 09 5 follow-ups, last by Weiye Loh on 02 Sep 09
Jude John

What's so Original in Academic Research? - 26 views

Thanks for your comments. I may have appeared to be contradictory, but what I really meant was that ownership of IP should not be a motivating factor to innovate. I realise that in our capitalistic...

started by Weiye Loh on 21 Aug 09 4 follow-ups, last by Jude John on 25 Aug 09
guanyou chen

Ethically confusing defamation problem - 4 views

Link: http://www.rednano.sg/sfe/pastnews.action?&querystring=online%20defamation&pubid=ST&sort=D Summary: A man who visited and then later robbed a prostitute was chastised a...

defamation online forum

started by guanyou chen on 19 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
juliet huang

Online privacy concerns arise as website lists personal data - 5 views

The link : http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/448207/1/.html Case Summary: Red Nano is a people-search engine which allows others to find you in the public int...

rednano online identity

started by juliet huang on 19 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
joanne ye

TJC Stomp Scandal - 34 views

This is a very interesting topic. Thanks, Weiman! From the replies for this topic, I would say two general questions surfaced. Firstly, is STOMP liable for misinformation? Secondly, is it right for...

started by Weiman Kow on 19 Aug 09 3 follow-ups, last by joanne ye on 26 Aug 09
Jiamin Lin

Sue Facebook for sharing your info? Seriously? - 5 views

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32467318/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/ How often do people read the terms and conditions that are available on the website? Were you one of those...

started by Jiamin Lin on 29 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Kathleen Tan

Hacked blogger seeks Russia probe - 20 views

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8194395.stm To sum it up, the article is about a russian blogger who asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to hold an inquiry, claiming that russian...

Hacking denial of service online rumours political spam

started by Kathleen Tan on 16 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Li-Ling Gan

Google Loses German Copyright Cases Over Image-Search Previews - 4 views

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=a_C1wVkCvPww Summary This case revolves around Google being sued for copyright infringement over displaying photos and artworks as thumbnails w...

copyright

started by Li-Ling Gan on 25 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Karin Tan

Hurray, file sharing being legal! - 12 views

Hi Karin, I don't think it would be necessarily bad news for record companies. Some musicians gained popularity only after their music files were passed over the internet. In some ways, it could ...

started by Karin Tan on 26 Aug 09 3 follow-ups, last by Karin Tan on 26 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

The School Issue - Junior High - Coming Out in Middle School - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...27out-t.html

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Oct 09 - Cached
  • What had changed? Not only were there increasingly accurate and positive portrayals of gays and lesbians in popular culture, but most teenagers were by then regular Internet users. Going online broke through the isolation that had been a hallmark of being young and gay, and it allowed gay teenagers to find information to refute what their families or churches sometimes still told them — namely, that they would never find happiness and love.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 07 Oct 09
       
      The non-neutrality of the media goes both way. It affects how we see things negatively, and also how we see things positively.
  • In particular, openly gay youth who are perceived as conforming to adolescent gender norms are often fully integrated into their peer and school social circles. Girls who come out as bisexual but are still considered “feminine” are often immune from harassment, as are some gay boys, like Laddie, who come out but are still considered “masculine.” “Bisexual girls have it the easiest,” Austin told me in Oklahoma. “Most of the straight guys at school think that’s hot, so that can make the girl even more popular.”
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 07 Oct 09
       
      Gender discrimination intersects with seuxality discrimination
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: Should non-experts shut up? The skeptic's catch-22 - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...perts-shut-up-skeptics_14.html

Science Communication skepticism

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Jul 10 - Cached
  • You can read the talk here, but in a nutshell, Massimo was admonishing skeptics who reject the scientific consensus in fields in which they have no technical expertise - the most notable recent example of this being anthropogenic climate change, about which venerable skeptics like James Randi and Michael Shermer have publicly expressed doubts (though Shermer has since changed his mind).
  • I'm totally with Massimo that it seems quite likely that anthropogenic climate change is really happening. But I'm not sure I can get behind Massimo's broader argument that non-experts should defer to the expert consensus in a field.
  • First of all, while there are strong incentives for a researcher to find errors in other work in the field, there are strong disincentives for her to challenge the field's foundational assumptions. It will be extremely difficult for her to get other people to agree with her if she tries, and if she succeeds, she'll still be taking herself down along with the rest of the field.
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  • Second of all, fields naturally select for people who accept their foundational assumptions. People who don't accept those assumptions are likely not to have gone into that field in the first place, or to have left it already.
  • Sometimes those foundational assumptions are simple enough that an outsider can evaluate them - for instance, I may not be an expert in astrology or theology, but I can understand their starting premises (stars affect human fates; we should accept the Bible as the truth) well enough to confidently dismiss them, and the fields that rest on them. But when the foundational assumptions get more complex - like the assumption that we can reliably model future temperatures - it becomes much harder for an outsider to judge their soundness.
  • we almost seem to be stuck in a Catch-22: The only people who are qualified to evaluate the validity of a complex field are the ones who have studied that field in depth - in other words, experts. Yet the experts are also the people who have the strongest incentives not to reject the foundational assumptions of the field, and the ones who have self-selected for believing those assumptions. So the closer you are to a field, the more biased you are, which makes you a poor judge of it; the farther away you are, the less relevant knowledge you have, which makes you a poor judge of it. What to do?
  • luckily, the Catch-22 isn't quite as stark as I made it sound. For example, you can often find people who are experts in the particular methodology used by a field without actually being a member of the field, so they can be much more unbiased judges of whether that field is applying the methodology soundly. So for example, a foundational principle underlying a lot of empirical social science research is that linear regression is a valid tool for modeling most phenomena. I strongly recommend asking a statistics professor about that. 
  • there are some general criteria that outsiders can use to evaluate the validity of a technical field, even without “technical scientific expertise” in that field. For example, can the field make testable predictions, and does it have a good track record of predicting things correctly? This seems like a good criterion by which an outsider can judge the field of climate modeling (and "predictions" here includes using your model to predict past data accurately). I don't need to know how the insanely-complicated models work to know that successful prediction is a good sign.
  • And there are other more field-specific criteria outsiders can often use. For example, I've barely studied postmodernism at all, but I don't have to know much about the field to recognize that the fact that they borrow concepts from complex disciplines which they themselves haven't studied is a red flag.
  • the issue with AGW is less the science and all about the political solutions. Most every solution we hear in the public conversation requires some level of sacrifice and uncertainty in the future.Politicians, neither experts in climatology nor economics, craft legislation to solve the problem through the lens of their own political ideology. At TAM8, this was pretty apparent. My honest opinion is that people who are AGW skeptics are mainly skeptics of the political solutions. If AGW was said to increase the GDP of the country by two to three times, I'm guessing you'd see a lot less climate change skeptics.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Jul 10
     
    WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 2010 Should non-experts shut up? The skeptic's catch-22
Weiye Loh

Op-Ed Columnist - The Moral Naturalists - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...23brooks.html

Philosophy Morality

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.
  • By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.
  • Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it. At as early as six months, the babies showed a preference for the helper over the hinderer. In some plays, there is a second act. The hindering figure is either punished or rewarded. In this case, 8-month-olds preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it.
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  • This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.
  • If you ask for donations with the photo and name of one sick child, you are likely to get twice as much money than if you had asked for donations with a photo and the names of eight children. Our minds respond more powerfully to the plight of an individual than the plight of a group.
  • If you are in a bad mood you will make harsher moral judgments than if you’re in a good mood or have just seen a comedy. As Elizabeth Phelps of New York University points out, feelings of disgust will evoke a desire to expel things, even those things unrelated to your original mood. General fear makes people risk-averse. Anger makes them risk-seeking.
  • People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view.
  • The moral naturalists differ over what role reason plays in moral judgments. Some, like Haidt, believe that we make moral judgments intuitively and then construct justifications after the fact. Others, like Joshua Greene of Harvard, liken moral thinking to a camera. Most of the time we rely on the automatic point-and-shoot process, but occasionally we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method.
  • For people wary of abstract theorizing, it’s nice to see people investigating morality in ways that are concrete and empirical. But their approach does have certain implicit tendencies. They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society. Their implied description of the moral life is gentle, fair and grounded. But it is all lower case. So far, at least, it might not satisfy those who want their morality to be awesome, formidable, transcendent or great.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Jul 10
     
    The Moral Naturalists By DAVID BROOKS Published: July 22, 2010
Weiye Loh

An insider's view of academic censorship in Singapore | Asian Correspondent - 0 views

uk.asiancorrespondent.com/...ademic-censorship-in-singapore

Censorship Academia Academic Freedom

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Mark, who is now assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong, talks candidly about the censorship, both self-imposed and external, that guided his research and writing.
  • During my 6 years in the city, I definitely became ever more acutely aware of "political sensitivities". Thus, there were comments that came up in interviews with some of Singapore's former political detainees (interviews which are cited in the book) that were not included because they would have possibly resulted in libel actions. There were other things, such as the deviousness of LKY's political negotiations with the British in the late 50s and early 60s, which we could have gone into further (the details have been published) rather than just pointing to them in the footnotes. Was this the result of a subconscious self-censorship or a desire to move the story on? I'm still thinking about that one. But I do recall that, as a foreign academic working at the National Univ. of Singapore, you inevitably became careful about what sort of public criticism you directed at your paymasters. No doubt, this carefulness ultimately seeps into you (though I think good work can be done in Singapore, nevertheless, and many people in academia there continue to do it).
  • The decision to halt Singapore: a Biography in 1965, and in that sense narrow the narrative, was a very conscious one. I am still not comfortable tackling Singapore's political history after 1965, given the current political constraints in the Republic, and the official control of the archive. I have told publishers who have enquired about us extending the story or writing a sequel that this would involve a narrative far more critical of the ruling party. Repressive political measures that might have garnered a degree of popular support in the turbulent early-60s became, I believe, for many Singaporeans, less justifiable and more reprehensible in the 70s and 80s (culminating with the disgust that many people felt over the treatment of Catholic agitators involved in the so-called "Marxist conspiracy" of 1987).
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  • As for the rise of the PAP, my personal view is that in the late 1950s the PAP was the only viable alternative to colonial rule, once Marshall had bailed - that is, in terms of getting Singapore out of its postwar social and economic predicament. As much as my heart is with the idealists who founded the Barisan, I'm not sure they would have achieved the same practical results as the PAP did in its first 5 years, had they got into power. There were already rifts in the Barisan prior to Operation Cold Store in 1963, and the more one looks into the party at this time, the more chaotic it appears. (Undoubtedly, this chaos was also a result of the pressures exerted upon it by the PAP.)
  • when the Barisan was systematically destroyed, hopeless though its leaders might have proved as technocrats, Singapore turned a corner. From 1963, economic success and political stability were won at the expense of freedom of expression and 'responsible dissent', generating a conformity, an intellectual sterility and a deep loss of historical identity that I hope the Epilogue to the book conveys. That's basically my take on the rise of the PAP. The party became something very different from 1963.
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Aug 10
     
    An insider's view of academic censorship in Singapore
Weiye Loh

The Way We Live Now - I Tweet, Therefore I Am - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...01wwln-lede-t.html

Twitter Technology

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Each Twitter post seemed a tacit referendum on who I am, or at least who I believe myself to be. The grocery-store episode telegraphed that I was tuned in to the Seinfeldian absurdities of life; my concern about women’s victimization, however sincere, signaled that I also have a soul. Together they suggest someone who is at once cynical and compassionate, petty yet deep. Which, in the end, I’d say, is pretty accurate.
  • Distilling my personality provided surprising focus, making me feel stripped to my essence. It forced me, for instance, to pinpoint the dominant feeling as I sat outside with my daughter listening to E.B. White. Was it my joy at being a mother? Nostalgia for my own childhood summers? The pleasures of listening to the author’s quirky, underinflected voice? Each put a different spin on the occasion, of who I was within it. Yet the final decision (“Listening to E.B. White’s ‘Trumpet of the Swan’ with Daisy. Slow and sweet.”) was not really about my own impressions: it was about how I imagined — and wanted — others to react to them. That gave me pause. How much, I began to wonder, was I shaping my Twitter feed, and how much was Twitter shaping me?
  • sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand. Twitter has extended that metaphor to include aspects of our experience that used to be considered off-set: eating pizza in bed, reading a book in the tub, thinking a thought anywhere, flossing. Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.
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  • Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter — has shifted not only how we spend our time but also how we construct identity. For her coming book, “Alone Together,” Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., interviewed more than 400 children and parents about their use of social media and cellphones. Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.”
  • when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy? The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity.
  • I am trying to gain some perspective on the perpetual performer’s self-consciousness. That involves trying to sort out the line between person and persona, the public and private self.
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Aug 10
     
    THE WAY WE LIVE NOW I Tweet, Therefore I Am
Weiye Loh

The American Spectator : Can't Live With Them… - 1 views

spectator.org/...cant-live-with-them

Intellectual Common Sense

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • ommentators have repeatedly told us in recent years that the gap between rich and poor has been widening. It is true, if you compare the income of those in the top fifth of earners with the income of those in the bottom fifth, that the spread between them increased between 1996 and 2005. But, as Sowell points out, this frequently cited figure is not counting the same people. If you look at individual taxpayers, Sowell notes, those who happened to be in the bottom fifth in 1996 saw their incomes nearly double over the decade, while those who happened to be in the top fifth in 1995 saw gains of only 10 percent on average and those in the top 5 percent actually experienced decline in their incomes. Similar distortions are perpetrated by those bewailing "stagnation" in average household incomes -- without taking into account that households have been getting smaller, as rising wealth allows people to move out of large family homes.
  • Sometimes the distortion seems to be deliberate. Sowell gives the example of an ABC news report in the 1980s focusing on five states where "unemployment is most severe" -- without mentioning that unemployment was actually declining in all the other 45 states. Sometimes there seems to be willful incomprehension. Journalists have earnestly reported that "prisons are ineffective" because two-thirds of prisoners are rearrested within three years of their release. As Sowell comments: "By this kind of reasoning, food is ineffective as a response to hunger because it is only a matter of time after eating before you get hungry again. Like many other things, incarceration only works when it is done."
  • why do intellectuals often seem so lacking in common sense? Sowell thinks it goes with the job-literally: He defines "intellectuals" as "an occupational category [Sowell's emphasis], people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas -- writers, academics and the like." Medical researchers or engineers or even "financial wizards" may apply specialized knowledge in ways that require great intellectual skill, but that does not make them "intellectuals," in Sowell's view: "An intellectual's work begins and ends with ideas [Sowell's emphasis]." So an engineer "is ruined" if his bridges or buildings collapse and so with a financier who "goes broke… the proof of the pudding is ultimately in the eating…. but the ultimate test of a [literary] deconstructionist's ideas is whether other deconstructionists find those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant or ingenious. There is no external test." The ideas dispensed by intellectuals aren't subject to "external" checks or exposed to the test of "verifiability" (apart from what "like-minded individuals" find "plausible") and so intellectuals are not really "accountable" in the same way as people in other occupations.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • it is not quite true, even among tenured professors in the humanities, that idea-mongers can entirely ignore "external" checks. Even academics want to be respectable, which means they can't entirely ignore the realities that others notice. There were lots of academics talking about the achievements of socialism in the 1970s (I can remember them) but very few talking that way after China and Russia repudiated these fantasies.
  • THE MOST DISTORTING ASPECT of Sowell's account is that, in focusing so much on the delusions of intellectuals, he leaves us more confused about what motivates the rest of society. In a characteristic passage, Sowell protests that "intellectuals...have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, have long been rated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such as class -- and more recently 'gender' -- have been projected as either more real or more important."
  • There's no disputing the claim that most "intellectuals" -- surely most professors in the humanities-are down on "patriotism" and "religion" and probably even "family." But how did people get to be patriotic and religious in the first place? In Sowell's account, they just "sorted themselves" -- as if by the invisible hand of the market.
  • Let's put aside all the violence and intimidation that went into building so many nations and so many faiths in the past. What is it, even today, that makes people revere this country (or some other); what makes people adhere to a particular faith or church? Don't inspiring words often move people? And those who arrange these words -- aren't they doing something similar to what Sowell says intellectuals do? Is it really true, when it comes to embracing national or religious loyalties, that "the proof of the pudding is in the eating"?
  • Even when it comes to commercial products, people don't always want to be guided by mundane considerations of reliable performance. People like glamour, prestige, associations between the product and things they otherwise admire. That's why companies spend so much on advertising. And that's part of the reason people are willing to pay more for brand names -- to enjoy the associations generated by advertising. Even advertising plays on assumptions about what is admirable and enticing-assumptions that may change from decade to decade, as background opinions change. How many products now flaunt themselves as "green" -- and how many did so 20 years ago?
  • If we closed down universities and stopped subsidizing intellectual publications, would people really judge every proposed policy by external results? Intellectuals tend to see what they expect to see, as Sowell's examples show -- but that's true of almost everyone. We have background notions about how the world works that help us make sense of what we experience. We might have distorted and confused notions, but we don't just perceive isolated facts. People can improve in their understanding, developing background understandings that are more defined or more reliable. That's part of what makes people interested in the ideas of intellectuals -- the hope of improving their own understanding.
  • On Sowell's account, we wouldn't need the contributions of a Friedrich Hayek -- or a Thomas Sowell -- if we didn't have so many intellectuals peddling so many wrong-headed ideas. But the wealthier the society, the more it liberates individuals to make different choices and the more it can afford to indulge even wasteful or foolish choices. I'd say that means not that we have less need of intellectuals, but more need of better ones. 
Weiye Loh

Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From | Magazine - 0 views

m.wired.com/...1

Invention Cultural Industries Innovation

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.
  • Seven centuries are an eyeblink in the scope of Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants, which looks back over some 50,000 years of history and peers nearly that far into the future. His argument is similarly sweeping: Technology, Kelly believes, can be seen as a sort of autonomous life-form, with intrinsic goals toward which it gropes over the course of its long development. Those goals, he says, are much like the tendencies of biological life, which over time diversifies, specializes, and (eventually) becomes more sentient.
  • We share a fascination with the long history of simultaneous invention: cases where several people come up with the same idea at almost exactly the same time. Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio—all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.
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  • It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.
  • Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
  • The musician Brian Eno invented a wonderful word to describe this phenomenon: scenius. We normally think of innovators as independent geniuses, but Eno’s point is that innovation comes from social scenes,from passionate and connected groups of people.
  • It turns out that the lone genius entrepreneur has always been a rarity—there’s far more innovation coming out of open, nonmarket networks than we tend to assume.
  • Really, we should think of ideas as connections,in our brains and among people. Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters.
  • ideas are networks
  • In part, that’s because ideas that leap too far ahead are almost never implemented—they aren’t even valuable. People can absorb only one advance, one small hop, at a time. Gregor Mendel’s ideas about genetics, for example: He formulated them in 1865, but they were ignored for 35 years because they were too advanced. Nobody could incorporate them. Then, when the collective mind was ready and his idea was only one hop away, three different scientists independently rediscovered his work within roughly a year of one another.
  • Charles Babbage is another great case study. His “analytical engine,” which he started designing in the 1830s, was an incredibly detailed vision of what would become the modern computer, with a CPU, RAM, and so on. But it couldn’t possibly have been built at the time, and his ideas had to be rediscovered a hundred years later.
  • I think there are a lot of ideas today that are ahead of their time. Human cloning, autopilot cars, patent-free law—all are close technically but too many steps ahead culturally. Innovating is about more than just having the idea yourself; you also have to bring everyone else to where your idea is. And that becomes really difficult if you’re too many steps ahead.
  • The scientist Stuart Kauffman calls this the “adjacent possible.” At any given moment in evolution—of life, of natural systems, or of cultural systems—there’s a space of possibility that surrounds any current configuration of things. Change happens when you take that configuration and arrange it in a new way. But there are limits to how much you can change in a single move.
  • Which is why the great inventions are usually those that take the smallest possible step to unleash the most change. That was the difference between Tim Berners-Lee’s successful HTML code and Ted Nelson’s abortive Xanadu project. Both tried to jump into the same general space—a networked hypertext—but Tim’s approach did it with a dumb half-step, while Ted’s earlier, more elegant design required that everyone take five steps all at once.
  • Also, the steps have to be taken in the right order. You can’t invent the Internet and then the digital computer. This is true of life as well. The building blocks of DNA had to be in place before evolution could build more complex things. One of the key ideas I’ve gotten from you, by the way—when I read your book Out of Control in grad school—is this continuity between biological and technological systems.
  • technology is something that can give meaning to our lives, particularly in a secular world.
  • He had this bleak, soul-sucking vision of technology as an autonomous force for evil. You also present technology as a sort of autonomous force—as wanting something, over the long course of its evolution—but it’s a more balanced and ultimately positive vision, which I find much more appealing than the alternative.
  • As I started thinking about the history of technology, there did seem to be a sense in which, during any given period, lots of innovations were in the air, as it were. They came simultaneously. It appeared as if they wanted to happen. I should hasten to add that it’s not a conscious agency; it’s a lower form, something like the way an organism or bacterium can be said to have certain tendencies, certain trends, certain urges. But it’s an agency nevertheless.
  • technology wants increasing diversity—which is what I think also happens in biological systems, as the adjacent possible becomes larger with each innovation. As tech critics, I think we have to keep this in mind, because when you expand the diversity of a system, that leads to an increase in great things and an increase in crap.
  • the idea that the most creative environments allow for repeated failure.
  • And for wastes of time and resources. If you knew nothing about the Internet and were trying to figure it out from the data, you would reasonably conclude that it was designed for the transmission of spam and porn. And yet at the same time, there’s more amazing stuff available to us than ever before, thanks to the Internet.
  • To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap. Another example is spectrum. One reason we have this great explosion of innovation in wireless right now is that the US deregulated spectrum. Before that, spectrum was something too precious to be wasted on silliness. But when you deregulate—and say, OK, now waste it—then you get Wi-Fi.
  • If we didn’t have genetic mutations, we wouldn’t have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.
  • image of the coral reef as a metaphor for where innovation comes from. So what, today, are some of the most reeflike places in the technological realm?
  • Twitter—not to see what people are having for breakfast, of course, but to see what people are talking about, the links to articles and posts that they’re passing along.
  • second example of an information coral reef, and maybe the less predictable one, is the university system. As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.
  • Life seems to gravitate toward these complex states where there’s just enough disorder to create new things. There’s a rate of mutation just high enough to let interesting new innovations happen, but not so many mutations that every new generation dies off immediately.
  • , technology is an extension of life. Both life and technology are faces of the same larger system.
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Sep 10
     
    Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From By Wired September 27, 2010  |  2:00 pm  |  Wired October 2010
Weiye Loh

Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated?: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

Science Politics Democracy

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The myth of the scientific method as a series of neat and tidy steps from hypothesis and prediction to experiment and conclusion is busted once you go into a lab and observe the more haphazard and messy realities of how researchers feel their way toward discovery. So it is with liberal democracies, which almost never work out as planned but somehow progress ever closer to finding the right balance between individual liberty and social order. The constitutions of nations are grounded in the constitution of humanity, which science is best equipped to understand.
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10
     
    Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated? Mixing science and politics is tricky but necessary for a functioning polity
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